trans(literate, late), reinterpret [disquiet0286] by Nate Trier

This week's exercise was to record something, then transliterate it, translate it, and interpret it.

I improvised a piano melody (the first thing you hear), then set to work. First, to translate it, I sent it to a toy piano synth and mercilessly quantized it onto the beat. I ended up with a funky cluster samba at times, which is quite ok with me.

Then, to transliterate it, I ran it through Ableton's "Scale" plugin to invert the intervals from the original (all C's remained C's, all D's became B's...I think, I didn't really look too closely at what I was doing). For both of these, I added some random pitch variation to represent translation errors, noise, and/or artifacts.

Finally, to interpret it, I sped it up and made it two octaves higher, then told Ableton to change that to MIDI and play it on a synth. The new melody follows the contours of the original melody (perhaps).

I just came back from a retreat where we performed a lot of Pauline Oliveros, and I think I am in a meditative mood, so the piece unfolds pretty slowly and sparsely. The opening gestures come back sporadically, as a faint memory, to glue everything together.

More on this 286th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Found in Translation: Make three versions of something from different distances — at:

https://disquiet.com/0286/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

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Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0286-found-in-translation/

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Image associated with this project is by Flickr member Hannah, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

flic.kr/p/6HUQyt

creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/